Cide Hamete Benengeli’s supposed manuscript is written in Arabic.
Cervantes introduces Benengeli in Part One as an Arab Muslim historian whose manuscript records Don Quixote’s adventures. The narrator claims to discover the Arabic text in Toledo and then arranges for it to be translated into Spanish. This invented source creates a playful distance between Cervantes and the story, as though he were editing a real historical account rather than composing a novel.
The manuscript is not genuinely Arabic: Benengeli is a fictional author, and the framing device is part of Cervantes’s metafictional humor. The narrator even comments on the supposed historian’s reliability, turning translation and authorship into running jokes. Readers sometimes confuse the manuscript’s language with the language of the published novel, which is Spanish.
Benengeli’s name and identity also reflect the complex presence of Arabic, Muslim, and Morisco culture in early modern Spain. The device parodies chivalric romances, which often claimed to translate older or foreign sources.